Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

I dislike Fridays.

Friday is that day of the week when things slow down, for no real reason.

In a global economy, things move fast, 24/7 and there is little reason to curb one’s momentum.

Fridays in the US are the days that predate the weekend. Quite naturally, work is done sloppily, carelessly and in a rush in order to make it to the corporate ‘happy hour.’

Right.

While people need physical and mental breaks from work, Fridays lead to a downhill slip of production. Domain inquiries don’t get answered, decisions are postponed ‘for next week’; come Monday, the rush to undo what was broken and to do what wasn’t done on Friday creates plenty of chaos.

So get things done, regardless of the day of the week. Especially, on a Friday.

TGIF?

If you don’t ask, you won’t get. It’s simple as that.

Every offer on a domain that you own is tied to your response. You control its sale and whether you will make money, or not.

As I said in the past, using buy it now pricing at Sedo might work for some – if they are comfortable with how they priced the domain at the time of its listing.

It does not work for me; negotiation is the key.

Not every negotiation will lead to a sale. One has to be a confident domainer and utilize experience along with the proverbial ‘gut feeling’ when negotiating with a potential buyer.

Back to the $1 billion dollars.

Apparently, Instagram – the image processing and sharing service that was sold to Facebook for $1 billion dollars – didn’t just get that number as a ‘gift’. The Instagram CEO, Kevin Systrom, originally asked for $2 billion dollars.

Systrom negotiated, perhaps overly-confidently, and thus eventually ‘trimmed’ his asking price down to $1 billion dollars. For an 18-month old start-up, that’s still a lot of money.

When dealing with a potential buyer, hidden behind anonymity or not, you are in control of your profit and negotiating the price is mandatory.

Recently I discovered that Google bots were being blocked after visiting my server.

After examining the log files, it appeared that Google bots were not just visiting, they were attempting to FTP into the server, something that perplexed me.

After several such blocks, an entire C class of Google’s network would be blocked, due to the rules of my firewall.

The logs look like this:

66.249.71.13 # lfd: (ftpd) Failed FTP login from 66.249.71.13 (US/United States/crawl-66-249-71-13.googlebot.com): 1 in the last 300 secs – Tue Apr 17 04:58:43 2012

66.249.71.238 # lfd: (ftpd) Failed FTP login from 66.249.71.238 (US/United States/crawl-66-249-71-238.googlebot.com): 1 in the last 300 secs – Tue Apr 17 05:03:23 2012

66.249.71.73 # lfd: (ftpd) Failed FTP login from 66.249.71.73 (US/United States/crawl-66-249-71-73.googlebot.com): 1 in the last 300 secs – Tue Apr 17 05:34:46 2012

66.249.71.0/24 # lfd: (NETBLOCK) 66.249.71.0/24 has had more than 4 blocks in the last 86400 secs – Tue Apr 17 05:34:36 2012

As I have anonymous FTP turned off, I resorted to researching Google about its own snooping behavior. I found out it’s not uncommon, as others reported the same behavior by Google bots attempting to FTP into servers.

A response to a similar question was given by a Google technician from Switzerland, who stated:

“When we find links to FTP content, we’ll generally attempt to crawl those URLs. If they’re publicly accessible and return normal content, we may choose to index them as well. While it’s not that common, there are occasionally queries where a file on an FTP server is a good result. [...] If you wish to block crawling of a public FTP server, you can use the robots.txt file just as you would on a normal website. If your FTP server isn’t publicly accessible, then you wouldn’t need to do anything specific to prevent that content from being indexed (as it can’t be accessed).”

The problem is, that there is no public FTP on my server and thus the reasoning behind visits from Google bots, along with the above method of blocking Google bots do not apply.

I resorted to checking my logs frequently and removing entries where Google had been blocked, manually. It seems that Google keeps on trying to unlock a virtual door with no keyhole to it.

I first used the Internet in the late 80′s, even though back then it was just email; something that worked surprisingly well. There was no spam, and to read my email I needed permission from the university’s IT department manager. Every single time.

These days, we take it for granted; we are wired – or wireless – on the global network that spans every nation in the world, 24/7. It’s an endless connection, a digital umbilical cord that we’re using non-stop, in order to stay informed, in touch or in sync with the rest of the so-called ‘civilized’ world.

While 20% of adult Americans still don’t use the Internet, those of us that do know well that we can’t unplug from the “grid”; we can’t exit the “matrix” and we cannot escape the “web”. The Internet is part of our modern existence, regardless of whether we use specific parts of it, during our day’s time slice.

Can you stay off the Internet? I doubt it.

Popular domain news aggregator, Domaining.com, is currently down, due to unforeseen circumstances.

While we all hope that Francois Carrillo will bring his virtual baby back up soon, it’s interesting seeing how much Domaining.com has changed, since its launch in 2007.

Here’s a timeline, courtesy of Screenshots.com